


the perfectly tragic life and death of one serverus snape

by vixen (hestiaandhercat)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: I should have done that, Other, also literary analysis, snape reflecting on his life while he is dying, very nearly called this HP Lit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:00:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23873563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hestiaandhercat/pseuds/vixen
Summary: His life, he thinks, is a perfect tragedy.The thought amuses him, since there have been many words spent on describing Severus John Snape, but perfect isn’t usually one of them. He has a lover, a death eater, a traitor.Human?He doesn’t know anymore, and that is what scares him, in those last moments, the boy leaning over him, life slipping away.He used to know.He tries to think, tries to remember, and he ends up pouring memories into the bottle that the boy is holding, green eyes, shaking hands that he is not supposed to see, but it makes no matter now. The battle is over and Severus is falling for the final time.A perfect tragedy, he thinks, waiting for the impact.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	1. act one: exposition

He lives in a small house, at the uttermost edge of town. His name is Sevvy, not Severus, and his mother, who has chosen that name, and after his sixth birthday finally and begrudgingly agreed to the shortened version, shouts that name a lot.

He is always out and about, leaving his mother behind to call him with a voice strained by more than age, always anxious that one day he won’t answer.

He does answer, for now at least. He does not have friends in the village, he does not make friends easily - his clothes mark him as poor and his eyes mark him as interesting, and poor and interesting people are seldomly appreciated.

Lily appreciates him well enough, though, and he is often angry with himself for not having talked to her earlier, feeling like maybe she alone could’ve single-handedly undone all the bad days of his childhood.

But that is wrong, of course. She can’t undo his father, always drunk, always screaming, or his mother, always anxious, always bitter, and she can’t undo him either, unravel the core of him, the pure, innocent core out of the layers of bitterness he has already spun around it.

He does not think that he is past redemption. He has not done anything so far that deserves redemption. He does, however, realize on an abstract level that there is already something widely different about him, compared to her.

It intrigues him. Lily intrigues him.

He does not realize that she isn’t equally intrigued by him until they are on the train to Hogwarts. She, he sees now, belatedly, was intrigued by magic all along, and perfectly happy to make a friend along the way. But she doesn't feel the end to unravel him, to understand him to the core. She does not feel, will never feel, like he feels about her, and that is perfectly fine.

That evening in the Great Hall, he asks the Hat if he could go into Gryffindor. The Hat calls him out on it.

“Ravenclaw I could give you, would happily give you, even. Hufflepuff I could settle for. Slytherin I will accept. But Gryffindor? Tell me, are you supposed to be brave  _ or  _ stupid?”

Later, he’ll talk to Albus about the Sorting Hat, and realize that the Hat is essentially speaking to each and every child with their own voice, merely a fragment of their mind that is momentarily pulled out of their head.

It seems fitting to him that he has in this way, damned himself. Don’t all tragedies go that way?


	2. act two: rising action

Severus quickly adapts to Hogwarts. He is used to tiptoeing around anyone who could mean serious danger, and be tiptoed around in turn. What he is not expecting is the way Slytherins treat each other. Or how there seems to be nobody who is impressed by him, a scrawny, too-thin eleven year old with a gift for potions and a voice that has not yet developed any of its silken dangerousness.

Sometimes he lies awake at night and calmly wonders if he has made the wrong choice. Mother has written him a letter, saying how proud she is that he made it into her old house. Severus knows that that letter would’ve arrived just the same if he went into Ravenclaw, but that it wouldn’t have been meant with the same earnestness. It feels good to make someone proud. Yet he can’t help but wonder how it’d feel like to make himself proud.

His dormmates disgust him. They aren’t smart or ambitious or basically anything that Salazar has hoped for in his students. They are just… vile, and Severus is afraid that maybe he is just as vile as they are, vile and stupid and nothing else, and that he simply isn’t able to see that yet.

He asks Lily about that, one afternoon when they are sitting near the Great Lake talking about classes. She thinks it’s funny at first, but when her humor doesn’t wipe the frown off his face, she becomes more serious as well.

“You’re not vile”, she says, in that certain type of voice that she always uses when conveying important stuff, almost as if she is telling him a secret that only she knows.

Severus keeps that moment in his head over the years. He is not a vile person. He knows this now, with the uttermost certainty. It still doesn’t change anything.


	3. act three: climax

Looking back on his life now, while he is falling, falling, and never landing, he suspects that there isn‘t a prime moment where it all went wrong, the One Choice he made that fucked everything else up. There is, however, a certain inclination towards fucking up that seems to be apparent in various moments of his life.

His father, screaming.

Severus, in the air, sneering.

Lucius Malfoy, inviting him to a Very Secret Meeting, and him accepting because he has waited for this opportunity for so long now, and he wants to show people that he is good for something, good at something, that he can do this.

He is not a vile creature then, he decides. Just a confused and scared boy who spent an entire week sleeping in front of the Gryffindor Common Room, to no avail. He has not been forgiven. Well, he does not need to be forgiven then.

His redemption arc flattens and slowly winks out of existence.

He is not a vile creature later, when he meets the Dark Lord for the first time, or at any moment during the meetings they hold after; but he is a man now, a man who has done wrong and he knows this, but he pretends he doesn‘t care. And he doesn‘t. He keeps telling himself that.

He does not regularly kill people, at least. He is not a mere Death Eater, one of the legion. In the beginning he isn‘t allowed to go with them because the Dark Lord doesn‘t trust him yet, and so he stays at Lucius‘ side, Lucius, who has done many good things for him, and he  _ knows  _ that Lucius is a scheming little prick, but as long as his scheming helps Severus, he doesn‘t see why that should bug him. It‘s the way life is, these days.

Later, when the Dark Lord makes him Potion Master, a position that Severus is pretty sure Lucius invented on the spot, he stays behind because he is important now, not Important with a capital I, the way Lucius or Bellatrix are, but still important enough to not be wasted in frivolous attacks on mudbloods.

He finds a new liking to the word mudblood, because if he says it often enough, he might forget that mudbloods are people too, and that Lily is one of them.

He doesn‘t think about Lily (but he does), and she is not important to him anymore (but she is), and he does not clutch onto the memory of her telling him that he is not a vile creature to get through the days (only the nights).

This is normal. He is simply growing up, and if he keeps saying it in his head, over and over again, he might one day even come to believe it.

Yet if Severus is looking for actions, specific actions that are beyond the mere realm of accepting genocide, there are two that come to mind. One of them makes him evil, and even worse, stupid, a creature to be crushed under the foot. The other one makes him slightly less evil. Albus would say it makes him  _ good _ , but that is simply not true. He has left the realm of good a long time ago.

The first one is the day that he hears the prophecy. He doesn‘t know what it means, and that is his first mistake, to simply go and tell the Dark Lord something that Severus doesn‘t understand himself. His second mistake is realizing too late.

His third mistake is seeking out Dumbledore. Albus would say that he did  _ good  _ with this, but the only thing that he did do is stupid. Albus promises to keep Lily save (and James, and the stupid child) and Severus promises to change sides in this war that he doesn‘t understand and, he suspects, nobody else really understands either - they are simply fighting for the sake of fighting, and killing for the sake of killing, the same way you live for the sake of living.

If he had been smart, he muses, even now, when it‘s too late, way too late, he would‘ve at least tried to do something himself. Instead he was happy to have Albus take care of it, the same way Albus always took care of things. For the Greater Good.

He hasn‘t suspected foul play, even for years after. Albus seemed distraught enough about what happened that night, and he probably was, the old fool. Only after learning the details of Lily‘s spell, of the blood curse, he begins to piece together what happened, what actually happened, and realizes that he hasn‘t been any more than a pawn during all of this.

He isn‘t sure if Albus meant for him to hear the prophecy that night, or if it was simply a lucky coincidence that Albus managed to turn around for his benefit. He  _ is _ sure that Pettigrew was not as sound of a double agent as he is made out to be later, especially after having lived with the guy for an extended amount of time, and he can‘t help but wonder why Albus wasn‘t a bit more surprised when Black was proven innocent, almost as if he‘d known all along, as if he‘d told the Potters that Pettigrew would be the better Secret Keeper since no one would suspect him, and wasn‘t  _ that _ a lucky day for Peter?

Severus never asks Albus if what he suspects might be true, if Lily was a mere sacrifice that had to be made in order to switch up the game board. He is too afraid of the answer.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	4. act four: falling action

After that he is falling, always and now forevermore, and maybe that is why after all this time, the darkness at the bottom of the abyss doesn’t seem quite as frightening.

He has been falling for nearly eighteen years, after all. All that falling is tiring.

After the war is won (won - what a word), he starts to teach at Hogwarts. He is not cut out of the job and he knows it. He hates teaching. He hates the pathetic little brats he has to teach, with all their dreams and expectations and futures and easy smiles that he wipes of their faces as often as he can.

He is not a vile creature now. He is simply a dick.

Albus seems to think the way he teaches quite a clever guise, and tells him again and again how he must keep up the charade for the likely event that Voldemort does return. He always calls him Voldemort. It sounds kind of stupid, Severus decides. Maybe that is why they were made to call him the Dark Lord instead.

He turns into an automaton somewhere along the line and sometimes he realizes but is never able to fight his way out of it. He sleeps too much. His jabs at the students grow meaner and meaner. He does not think about the past. He does not indulge in fantasies of a future he will never have. He simply goes through the motions, day after day, and the only time that he still actually feels something is when his temper flares, and he doesn‘t like being angry because in those moments he feels like his father, but also he likes it, hungers after it, because in those moments he  _ feels _ .

It is almost a welcome intrusion to his state of not quite  _ being  _ when Voldemort does in fact return. He is all Slytherin again, when he speaks to him, ambitious and clever and reckless, and he lives for it, lives for the moments that feel like before.

It is not the same, though. He is aware of that. It is only the next best thing, because it keeps him from falling for a little bit longer, and he finds that in those moments, looking death in the eye, he doesn‘t mind living quite as much.

Albus dies, which is a shame for the war, but a final revenge for Lily. And he thinks that maybe he might be ready to stop falling now, just when suddenly it‘s his turn to die and he is not ready.


	5. act five: dénouement

The funny thing about falling for such a long time is that the impact loses all of its scariness.. Severus feels quite cut off from his fear, even in the final moments, even though he realizes he should be panicking, and maybe it‘s the poison in his veins, or maybe part of him has died a long time ago, but he doesn‘t panic.

He hasn‘t lived in years, but now, finally, he remembers all the things he should be doing, should‘ve done during those years, all those dreams he had once and cast away without a second look – for what even? A girl?

And he calls himself a Slytherin. He does not seem to be smarter than his dormmates after all.

But then the boy is there, green eyes in his father‘s face, looking scared, scared for him – and why is he scared, it‘s too late now anyway – and Severus is falling faster now, and there is remorse in him, regret – redemption?

No. He‘s gone too far for that, and he knows.

Still.  _ You are not a vile creature. _

A furtive smile, a ducking of heads. Two eleven year olds on a meadow.

And Severus is falling, now, and crying, for the first time in a long, long time.

He reaches the ground with a sudden impact that forces the last bit of air out of his lungs.

The world falters for a second and then moves on.


End file.
